THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

since many (most ?) of the new terrorist recruits are living and training in the afghanistan-pakistan border area , i fail to see the obsession with iraq.
...

hbg

I mean, jeez.

By your logic, Ican -

19 terrorists killed three thousand in one day, so, 190000 should be able to kill the entire US population in that same time period. Right? There are absolutely no other factors to take into account other then stupid numbers which don't scale. Right?

Cycloptichorn

We Have Seen The Enemy, And He Is Us. (Pogo)

Yes, Hamburger, while some worry about terrorists coming in PLANES to attack us, or coming on BOATS and then WALKING across our BORDERS to attack us, the truth (as I see it) is that we are very vulnerable economically. The dollar sank to parity with the Canadian dollar yesterday (1 =1) for the first time. And the dollar hit a low against the Euro. The Euro is only like 8 years old. Oil prices hit a new high of $83 a barrel. We lowered our interest rates but the rest of the world didn't. So the giant sucking sound you hear is foreign investors pulling their money out of the U.S. in favor of investments elsewhere.

We are told that we are a nation at war. But where, beyond the few thousands of soldiers who have died, have we been asked to make any sacrifice? Well, we are piling up debt and, arguably, we are piling up veterans with a lot of problems, but life for most of us goes on as usual.
We are a nation at war? How many of us think that is true for us.

There is no way to refute something that is illogical and stupid to the person who makes such claims. .

President Bush and visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai met Monday for security talks that reflected their concerns about the situation along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Karzai plans to discuss the flow of foreign fighters from Pakistan into his country in talks later this week with Musharraf.

(and what were the results , i would like to ask ? there seemed to be loud denials by pakistan - BUT NO ACTION !)

The major U.S. concern is that al Qaeda has established terrorist training camps in the North Waziristan tribal region. The National Intelligence Estimate issued last month characterized the border area as a terrorist safe haven, which officials attribute to the Musharraf peace deal that allowed more freedom for militants to operate. On-the-scene reporting shows that the Taliban move widely in the area, although Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam asserted at a weekly briefing Monday, "There is no al Qaeda or Taliban safe haven in Pakistan."

A cease-fire between the radicals and Pakistani authorities collapsed in the aftermath of the government's deadly assault last month on the Islamic militants occupying the Red Mosque in Islamabad. "The situation has been very tense here since July 15. Both sides are pounding each other with rockets and mortars," says tribesman Noroz Khan.

The once bustling city, on a main trade route with neighboring Afghanistan, now has a ghost-town feel. The banks, schools, post offices, and even hospitals and clinics have closed, and government workers have fled, fearing a full-scale military assault. Residents say that almost 30 percent of the population has left.

Tribal police have stopped functioning in the entire North Waziristan area in the face of threats from local Taliban, who operate widely, if not always openly. Taliban turn up carrying weapons and strutting on the roads. They appear all of a sudden in marketplaces, issue directives, and disappear. Along with Taliban, around 2,500 to 3,000 Uzbek militants are hiding in the area, intelligence sources believe.

There is a shortage of food, fuel, and other basic necessities as the Pakistani government has imposed a ban on the entry of many products into the area, a tribal region officially outside central government control. Civilians get caught in the crossfire. For instance, a barrage of rockets that landed in a residential area killed 14 civilians in the nearby town of Bannu in the second week of July.


Gul Zameen Khan, a local tribesman, thinks that a majority of residents cannot risk speaking out against either the Taliban or the government forces: "We have to live here. We can't afford the hostility."

Locals say it is difficult to turn down Taliban appeals for help against what are viewed as foreign occupiers in Afghanistan. "People living across the tribal belt are relatives to each other," says tribesman Noroz Khan. "It is almost impossible for Pashtuns to see their brothers or cousins fight and they sit idle."

U.S.News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved.

CORRECTION

realjohnboy, I generally agree with what you wrote here. However, I think the pending US financial problems are less a consequence of what we are spending on the Iraq war, and more a consequence of both our government's limits on our domestic oil field development, and on our government's violations of the US Constitution by stealing over a trillion dollars PER YEAR from smaller groups of voters and giving them to larger groups of voters.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

By the way,

Quote:

In one -year, ten-thousand could probably mass murder at least one-million Americans. Et cetera!

We know that the streets of America, with a unified and committed populace, not fractured by sectarian strife in the fashion of Iraq, would be an infinitely tougher place for terrorists to strike then the streets of Iraq;

We don't know any such thing. We know that domestic serial killers can continue their killing for many many killings until the police eventually discover them and arrest or kill them.

The populace can do nothing to stop them unless they are adequately armed to shoot those they believe are such killers before they kill again. However, the populace will often panic in such cases and kill the innocent with the guilty. While the police do that too, they generally do it less. Remember, the usual case is that police stop serial killers after they have mass murdered, not before. In the case of suicidal mass murderers, the suicidal mass murderers stop themselves in the act of mass murdering. The police are not deterrents of them.

yet you casually assume that they will have far more success in killing people here then they have enjoyed in Iraq. Logically, how do you come to this conclusion?

Believe me it's anything but casual. It's the result of careful analysis, not devotion to other people's platitudes. Terrorists, whether suicidal or not, are parallel and not serial murderers in that they kill many at the same time.

If they are not suicidal, terrorists strive to kill many each time they try. Furthermore, not all terrorists who plan to mass murder have to enter our country at the same time, or even within a given time period. They can enter in small groups as they can, and do significant mass murdering once they organize here, independent of any of their predecessors or successors.

Again, it is necessary to make it difficult for terrorists to enter our country in the first place. Border fences will help. Second, we must be able to monitor at least their international communications to determine their plans before not after they come here and mass murder. Third, once captured and indicted (preferrably off shore), we must be able to keep them incarcerated for as long as it takes to end their determination to mass murder. Court trials will only serve to overload what will already be overloaded police and other counter-terrorist forces, causing them to be far less effective.

Cycloptichorn

Face it, your platitudes cannot solve the terrorist threat problem here in America any more than they can solve them in Iraq or Afghanistan.

hamburger wrote:

since many (most ?) of the new terrorist recruits are living and training in the afghanistan-pakistan border area , i fail to see the obsession with iraq.
...

hbg

Al-Qaeda has told us many times they seek to train in Iraq, because there they can access more resources faster there, and therefore will be able to train more better and faster there.

'here, let's fight over this extremely important piece of land (which only coincidentally would keep you wrapped up and far, far away from my actual base of operations and stir up the locals against you, gaining us allies!) because this is the most important piece of land in the world and if you don't fight us here, we will march in here and take the place over and use this land to kill you!'

...

There's absolutely no doubt that a wave of terror attacks in America would put us into an emergency, war-time mode. In such a case, it would not take long for us to discover who is in our midst causing problems.

Your scare-mongering and platitudes aren't solving the terrorist threat - here, or in Iraq, in case you hadn't noticed. So I'm not stung in the least by your pronouncement.

'Careful analysis' my ass. You make numbers up, and think we will sit around on our thumbs instead of combating problems, and call it 'careful analysis.'

Cycloptichorn

Saturday, September 22, 2007
Pentagon Report Gives Lie to Surge Success
An article on how the schedule for turning Iraqi provinces over to the Iraqi army and police for security purposes has slipped to August 2008 notes of a new Pentagon report:



' The Pentagon report cited a litany of problems with the police. For example, it said as few as 40 percent of those trained by coalition troops in recent years are still on the job. Also, due to combat loss, theft, attrition and poor maintenance, a "significant portion" of U.S.-issued equipment is now unusable.'


Just to underline what is said here, 60 percent of the policemen who got even the very minimal training on offer to them have disappeared from the force; and not much is left of the weaponry ("equipment") that the US gave the Iraqi police.

The report is here (pdf).

The report also has two graphics that should make us very suspicious about all the declarations that the troop escalation or 'surge' has significantly reduced violence in Iraq. I cut the graphs in half, so they show only 2006 and 2007 and relabled them, but you can scroll down at the pdf link above to see the originals. I did not modify them in any other way.

The first graph shows average daily casualties (dead and wounded badly enough to go to hospital) by month in Iraq



This graph shows that there was no significant reduction in daily casualties in Iraq this summer. June saw a dip, mainly in civilian Iraqi casualties; coalition and Iraqi security force casualties were as bad as ever. Since the reduction in civilian casualties was not sustained, it is not significant, and could just have been a fluke (a few car bombs in markets failed to kill as many people as usual, e.g.) Somewhere around 150 persons continued to be killed or wounded every single day according to this chart, with a very minor daily reduction in the hot months of the summer when it is harder to fight.

The second graph gives the number of attacks per month. Obviously, a lot of attacks produce no casualties. Mortars land uselessly in the desert, e.g.



The graph does show a reduction in attacks for August, but what I notice is that the reduction in attacks did not come with regard either to Iraqi civilians or Iraqi security personnel, which seem the same height as previous months. The only significant reduction for August was with regard to attacks on coalition forces. (Since troop casualties do not seem to have been down very much for August, this statistic suggests that there were fewer attacks but they were more deadly. That is not good news.)

The Pentagon is trying to give us the impression that August was a 'trend', but statistically that is silly, since it was just one month and what came before it was pretty horrible. The dip in attacks in August does not seem to have come with much of a dip in casualties, in any case. And if all that is happening is that fewer US troops are being attacked, but similar numbers are being wounded or killed, I'm not sure that is even significant. Since some of the attacks were on the British in the south, changes in the way they were deployed could have had a small impact on these statistics.

The Pentagon tells us that violence in Baghdad is back down to the levels of summer, 2006. But whether that is true or not, the generalization cannot be made for Iraq, by the Pentagon's own statistics. If you do a three-month rolling average for months prior to September, whether you look at numbers of attacks or numbers of casualties, there has not been a significant improvement with regard to violence in the country as a whole.

Another screwup by this administration.


Feds target Blackwater in weapons probe


By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 45 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, N.C.

cicerone imposter wrote:

Another screwup by this administration.


Feds target Blackwater in weapons probe


By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 45 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, N.C.

How is this the administrations screwup?

Blackwater is a private company,they are not a govt entity.

IF this report is true,then blackwater messed up,not the govt.

Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war."

Ican, I'm just going to quit talking to you if you insist on going on tangents all the time like this.

MM, haven't you heard the phrase 'the buck stops here?'

Tell me, whose desk does that little placard sit on these days?

Cycloptichorn